When natural disasters strike, such as the recent tsunami in the Indian Ocean, many people wonder what role God is playing in these events. It is an age-old question and one not easily answered.
The danger is that we try to make God responsible for what we'd rather not take responsibility for and pretend we are self-sufficient in those areas where we'd like to forget that God is also involved. As the Oriental proverb says: "To raise flowers is a common thing, God alone gives them fragrance."
Blaming God for all the suffering in the world also allows us to avoid our own responsibilities. It is humans who build their homes in places that are vulnerable to natural destruction. That is rarely because of ignorance, but because safer places are more expensive. Greed and poverty often lie at the root of suffering.
As journalist Rex Murphy noted: "It is an axiom of this world that the worst things happen in the poorest places to people in the weakest circumstances. If you were born in the West, you've won the only lottery that really counts from the very first moment you take air."
That is a particularly important point to grasp. It has nothing to do with some inner virtue of ours that we live where we do. Nor is it a secret vice in the lives of those who fall on hard times that they suffer. The rain and sunshine both fall on the just and the unjust in this world. How we treat our good fortune, on the other hand, is in our control.
If we want to make God in some way responsible for the ills of the world, we also have to acknowledge the extraordinary capacity humans have been given to respond to suffering and evil. The reaction around the world to the tsunami has been truly amazing, and Canadian Presbyterians contributed more than $345,000 to the church's own aid relief.
Yet, as many aid agency representatives have noted and worried, a similar reaction is not present for so many other even larger horrors. The genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan has already claimed more than 50,000 lives and up to one million could die if aid does not get past the nefarious regime in Khartoum. Already, more than a million people have been displaced from their homes as a result of ethnic persecution by the Arabic Janjawid.
Besides war, there is the massive upheaval and suffering in African society caused by the HIV/AIDS crisis that the rest of the world seems unable or unwilling to grasp. Is it because the problem in Sudan is one of war and AIDS involves sex? If that is the case, it would amount to a moral judgment by the ultra-rich West on the poor in the world. For that, we shall surely incur God's judgment: the prophets of the Old Testament were far more clear on the evil of economic injustice than any other transgression.
Those prophets used speech to move people to reconsider their views and to conform their actions to God's laws. If they were declaiming today, perhaps they would use television or photography to help move people.
There is no doubt that pictures on television and in print media seen over the Christmas holiday helped to spur the generosity of people around the world to the plight of those who survived this massive natural disaster.
This issue of the Record has six pages of deeply moving photos of Africans affected by the AIDS/HIV pandemic. They were taken by photographer Carl Hiebert for use by Presbyterian World Service and Development who generously shared them with us — and you.
About 1,300 years ago, a monk known as John of Damascus wrote: "… as words edify the ear, so also the image stimulates the eye. … Just as words speak to the ear, so the images speak to the sight; it brings us understanding."
If John of Damascus is right in his observation, perhaps these photographs will be a vehicle of helping us to understand just a little bit better the complexities of suffering and evil and our response to them. Perhaps we may also glimpse something of the nature of God through them.
